Homogenization and Simplicity in Tank Roles

[Absurdity]

So really, the only benefit is the flavour of the stance. They are both the same mechanically speaking, so you can essentially call them the same stance. There is no simplicity there, just the same thing in a different coat of paint.

Flavour however often makes a big difference. The stances may achieve the same result but they are ever so slightly different in how they achieve that result, if you do that for more than a single ability it can have a big impact on how homogenized the tanks feel to play, and that's really the issue, they often "feel" like lazy copies of each other.


As for the healers, it's a bit difficult to say since I only ever pugged as a healer and when you pug you rarely ever have consistency, simply because even in savage you get tanks that are more effective at mitigating damage than others.

I do however not remember a single healer ever complaining about having to heal a specific tank job just because of their stances.

This could be partially due to tank stances being relatively irrelevant in Stormblood, it would be something we simply have to find out I guess.

[Mikey_R]

This could be partially due to tank stances being relatively irrelevant in Stormblood, it would be something we simply have to find out I guess.

This does bring up another interesting point. During HW and SB, most tanks were in their DPS stances for 99% on an encounter. This meant tanks had very similar HP (Warrior had an insignificant amount more) and they were all taking the same damage. It is effectively the same situation we have now. Sure, there were slight differences in the DPS stances, but nothing that affected your survivability where every tank worked the same. So, why is it now an issue?

[Ultimatecalibur]

This does bring up another interesting point. During HW and SB, most tanks were in their DPS stances for 99% on an encounter. This meant tanks had very similar HP (Warrior had an insignificant amount more) and they were all taking the same damage. It is effectively the same situation we have now. Sure, there were slight differences in the DPS stances, but nothing that affected your survivability where every tank worked the same. So, why is it now an issue?

Because a lot of people are wearing rose-tinted glasses looking back on things. They forget things like Warriors stacking Convalescence with Defiance so that the Scholar could apply and spread a 1200 potency crit adlo shield to the whole party at the start of the fight. They remember different being good and not different causing problems.

[AziraSyuren]

Because a lot of people are wearing rose-tinted glasses looking back on things. They forget things like Warriors stacking Convalescence with Defiance so that the Scholar could apply and spread a 1200 potency crit adlo shield to the whole party at the start of the fight. They remember different being good and not different causing problems.

THANK YOU

The OF tank forum has some of the most ill-informed, rose-tinted bullshit takes about tanks I have ever seen. It's literally just casuals (nothing wrong with that btw) or midcore players thinking they know best about a role they never (or rarely) bring into a context where its limits are truly tested. Tanking is literally at its best right now, outside of what are minor grievances with individual job design. It boggles my mind and makes me glad that the devs don't really listen to the OF's takes that much (glad i ain't a healer main lol).

Like, do people seriously not remember just how awful a lack of a slashing debuff felt? Or losing aggro because people other than you could play their job just incorrectly enough to pull aggro off of you? Or not have access to much of your toolkit because you weren't in the right stance, as even completely optimized gameplay precluded you from doing so?

Goodness. This homogenization comes from the fact that the dev team's attempts at "variety" have consistently fallen flat and resulted in profoundly frustrating gameplay at times.

[Absurdity]

This does bring up another interesting point. During HW and SB, most tanks were in their DPS stances for 99% on an encounter. This meant tanks had very similar HP (Warrior had an insignificant amount more) and they were all taking the same damage. It is effectively the same situation we have now. Sure, there were slight differences in the DPS stances, but nothing that affected your survivability where every tank worked the same. So, why is it now an issue?

It's an issue due to various other factors that happened at the same time. Nobody would've cared if they for example made all the stance oGCDs, effectively giving every tank stances that achieved the same result.

But they removed stances entirely, removed all mechanics associated with them, simplified certain other aspects of the tanks, either as a result of the stance removal or due to reworks that also made two of the tanks feel a lot more similar than they did before.
The removal of stances themselves isn't really the big issue, it's everything that came alongside their removal.

Goodness. This homogenization comes from the fact that the dev team's attempts at "variety" have consistently fallen flat and resulted in profoundly frustrating gameplay at times.

It's not exactly worthy of praise if the only way they manage to fix those frustrations is by monogenizing tanks.